Sunday, June 30, 2013

Kendra McLeod, single mother of two, underwent an abortion at a
clinic in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on June 12, 1998. She bled
heavily after the abortion. The day after her abortion, she sought help
at an emergency room. She had fainted three times by the time she got
into the emergency room at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center.
Doctors at the hospital transfused Kendra with nine units of blood and
performed surgery to try to save her life, to no avail. She died on June
30, at the age of 22.
Her family lost a lawsuit against the hospital. Documents do not note if the family sued the abortion provider.

Seventeen-year-old Jennifer Suddeth underwent a safe and legal abortion performed by Frank Robinson on June 30, 1982.
On the drive home, Jennifer bled heavily, alarming her boyfriend, John
Fredzess. Fredzess called the clinic repeatedly over the four hours
after their return home, but staff would not put the call through to
Robinson. One nurse admonished Fredzess to "be realistic" about how
severely Jennifer was bleeding.
By that time, Jennifer had bled through two pairs of sweat pants, two
blankets, and a towel. At last the hysterical husband was able to
contact Robinson, who insisted that the bleeding was normal and
instructed Fredzess to stop calling.
When Jennifer went into convulsions, Fredzess called an ambulance.
Paramedics arrived at the home to find Jennifer already dead. Police
interviewed the weeping and hysterical Fredzess, then pressed charges
against Robinson for involuntary manslaughter in Jennifer's death.
Although Robinson beat the rap, the state of California nevertheless
counted Jennifer's death as due to illegal abortion. Abortion advocates would assert that while Kendra's and Jennifer's deaths were tragic, more women would die if abortion were recriminalized. That claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Abortion deaths fell dramatically during the 20th century, not due to legalization of the practice but due to improved overall health and improved health-care practices.We can see that starting
in the 1940s, while abortion was still illegal, there was a massive drop in
maternal mortality from abortion. The death toll fell from 1,407 in 1940, to 744
in 1945, to 263 in 1950. Most researches attribute this plunge to the
development of blood transfusion techniques and the introduction of antibiotics.
And as you can see from the graph below, the fall in abortion deaths was in
place long before legalization. Legalization did nothing to change the number of
deaths each year; the trend had been in place for decades. Learn more here.

Since the Centers for Disease Control indicated that no woman should bleed to death from abortion, given the current state of medicine, Kendra's death must have begun with some screw-up. Jennifer's death was due to unadulterated quackery. If abortion-rights advocates are serious about protecting women's lives, they'd worry more about deadly quacks like Robinson and less about prolife pregnancy centers that keep women out of the hands of quacks like Robinson.

Note, please, that
with general public health issues such as doctors not using proper
aseptic techniques, lack of access to blood transfusions and
antibiotics, and overall poor health to begin with, there was likely
little difference between the performance of a legal abortion and
illegal practice, and the aftercare for either type of abortion was
probably equally unlikely to do the woman much, if any, good.

In fact, as you can see below, maternal mortality fell the fastest long before legalization due to improvements in health and medical practice. To claim that legalizing abortion reduced mortality is to claim credit that is due to other people.

Dawn was 22 weeks
pregnant. Her brother, who accompanied her, was instructed to wait in a
grassy park across the street, and to come back for her at 4 p.m. He
returned, as instructed, and was told that Dawn wasn't ready to leave
yet, to return in half an hour. When he came back at 5:30, staff told
him that his sister was dead.

Rubin had done a
D&C abortion on Dawn, a 28-year-old mother of two. Afterward Dawn
started screaming and gasping for breath. Her blood pressure fell and
she stopped breathing. Staff tried unsuccessfully to revive her, but did
not call an ambulance. Dawn died without ever being transferred to a
hospital.

The medical examiner determined that she had died from amniotic fluid embolism,
as evidenced by particles of placenta and amniotic fluid in her lungs.
This foreign matter in her bloodstream also caused disseminated
intravacsular coaglopathy, a blood clotting problem. The autopsy found
"about 1/2 liter of a yellowish fluid ... present in the abdominal
cavity" and "about 10cc of an amber colored fluid" in heart sac.

Decieved or lying?

Abortion advocates argue that although legal abortion deaths
like Dawn's are indeed sad, they're only a pale shadow of the carnage
that would ensue were legal protection restored to unborn children. They
use these claims to garner support among those otherwise reluctant to
support legal abortion as well as to slander life advocates.

There are two approaches Big Abortion takes when trying to scare people
into supporting legal abortion as a means of protecting women's lives:

Outright lying. They will trot out the long-disproven claim that 5,000 to 10,000 women were dying every year from abortion before legalization.

Bernard Nathanson,
co-founder of NARAL,* admitted that he and his associates knew that the
claims of 5,000 to 10,000 criminal abortion deaths were false. They
bandied them about anyway, Nathanson confessed, because they were
useful. This, too, is old news -- Nathanson came clean in 1979 when he
published //Aborting America//.

The truth is that you can take virtually any time period from when
public health officials first started collecting the data and you'll
find that abortion mortality fell.The only exception is a strange leveling-off in the 1950s that I've been unable to account for:

Milan Vuitch

What
caused abortion mortality to fall precipitously wasn't legalization.
Legalization didn't even make a blip in the trends, likely because for
every non-physician whose business fell away, a physician abortionist
became sloppy once the risk of a prison sentence for botching an
abortion was gone. I know of three erstwhile criminal abortionists -- Jesse Ketchum, Milan Vuitch, and Benjamin Munson
-- who kept their noses clean prior to legalization but each went on to
practice appallingly sloppy abortions that killed two patients after
legalization.

Friday, June 28, 2013

On June 28, 1900, a woman only identified as "Mrs. Andre Jorgenson" died on the scene from an illegal abortion.

Mrs. Anna Pihlgren, whose occupation is listed as nurse or midwife, was arrested and held by the Coroner's Jury. A man identified as Andre Pihlgren in the source, but who was probably the dead woman's husband, was held as an accessory.

Note, please, that with issues such as doctors not using proper aseptic
techniques, lack of access to blood transfusions and antibiotics, and
overall poor health to begin with, there was likely little difference
between the performance of a legal abortion and illegal practice, and
the aftercare for either type of abortion was probably equally unlikely
to do the woman much, if any, good. For more about abortion and abortion
deaths in the first years of the 20th century, seeAbortion Deaths 1900-1909.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Hermione Fowler, a 20-year-old coed at the Oklahoma A&M University,
died at her Red Oak, Oklahoma home on June 27, 1934, nine days after an
abortion perpetrated by noted local philanthropist Dr. Guy E. Brewer (pictured).
Hermoine was one of six women whose abortion deaths were blamed on
Brewer. He entered guilty pleas and served six concurrent four-year
sentences.

On June 24, 1929, 19-year-old homemaker Winifred Garver underwent an abortion at the office of Dr. Anna Schultz,
aka Rollins. Schultz was assisted by Dr. James White. For Winifred, however, the combined efforts of two doctors where not enough. She died on
June 27 at Woodlawn Hospital. On June 27, both physicians were held by
the coroner. Schultz was indicted for felony murder by a grand jury on
October 6, 1930.

Pamela Colson, age 31, was 12 weeks pregnant when friends drive her
to Women's Medical Services in Pensacola, Florida, for a safe and legal abortion June 26, 1994. Pamela bled heavily during the drive home. According to her friends,
Pamela became unresponsive, so they stopped at a motel. Two passers-by
did CPR while Pamela's friends called for an ambulance. Pamela was taken
to a hospital where she died after an emergency hysterectomy.
The cause of death was given as "irreversible shock from blood loss
due to a perforated uterus occurring at the time of an elective
abortion." William Keene was tentatively identified as having performed
the abortion.

On June 26, 1888, 16-year-old Annie Dorris died at Dr. Lucy Hagenow's
"maternity hospital" in San Francisco. She was buried the following day
based on a death certificate filed by Dr. Xavier Dodel, who claimed
that he'd been called to tend to her at her home for chills and fever
and had transferred her to Hagenow's care about two days before her
death, when his treatment was not successful. “A autopsy held on the remains which were disinterred for the purpose, showed that death was the result of an abortion.”

Augusta had read in a German newspaper that “Mrs. Hagenow's hospital on
Twelfth street was a good place,” so she took Annie there. “Mrs. Hagenow
said that she would cure the girl for $30 and took her into a private
room to examine her.” After Annie emerged, Hagenow charged her mother an
additional $10, saying that she had damaged an instrument due to Anna's
inability to lie still.

Three days later, Annie took to her bed, complaining of pains in her
legs and back. According to Annie's father, Frederick, Hagenow came to
the house to check on Annie. Hagenow took the girl into a side room,
from which Frederick heard Annie cry out. Hagenow emerged and said that a
"man doctor" had to be called in due to inflammation of the bowels and
high fever. Hagenow left and returned with Dr. Xavier Dodel. The two of
them went into the room with Annie, and again Frederick heard his
daughter cry out. Dodel emerged from the room with bloody hands.

Upon his recommendation, Annie was removed to the "Maternity Home," where she died on the third day.

Augusta said that
Hagenow's sister, Mrs. Seibert, told her that she'd taken her daughter
to a “hell hole” and that “other persons had been murdered there.” Anna
Hickert, who operated a bakery, said that she relayed to Hagenow that
Seibert had told her that Hagenow ran “a murderous den,” but Hagenow had
told Hickert not to relay this because her sister would deny having
ever said any such thing.

As Augusta testified
about her daughter's death, she “cried pitifully.” After being given
time to regain her composure, Augusta, with her husband by her side, was
asked about her encounter with Hagenow at the coroner's office. Augusta
said that Hagenow told her to denied ever meeting her, or she (Hagenow)
would end up doing 25 or 30 years at San Quentin. The coroner had
chased Hagenow from the room.

Hagenow eventually made bail, but the San Francisco Chronicle
noted, “The bond itself is a queer one. Although the signers qualify in
the aggregate for $20,000 there is more than the faint suspicion afloat
that it is a bond of straw.” Pretty fishy – perhaps in one case even
fictitious – characters were putting their signatures on it. “When Mrs.
Hagenow was released she ran to Dr. Dodel's cell and held a short
conversation with him. It is quite probable that he will soon be out on
bond if [Judge] Hornblower can be persuaded to accept the same kind of
sureties for him as he did for his female companion." Hagenow stuck to
her story that Annie had been deathly ill before she'd even been called
in.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

On June 25, 1911, 20-year-old Mrs. Anna Mueller died from a criminal abortion performed by Dr. George Lotz. Lotz was arrested July 5. He was indicted for felony murder. Leslie Reagan indicates that he was expelled from the Chicago Medical Society after admitting guilt in Anna's death, but there
is no record that he served time for the crime. In fact, he was free
and in Danville, Illinois in 1917, when he perpetrated a fatal attempted
abortion on Matilda Tidrick in 1917. Clearly, when legal protection is returned to unborn children, we will have to close up the loopholes that allowed butchers like Lotz to kill women and babies.

Although Anna's abortion was illegal, it was performed by somebody who had the tools and training to perform it up to the medical standards of the time. The same can't be said of the other woman whose death we commemorate today.

On June 13, 1882,
Ruth Phillips delivered stillborn twins. She was near death herself. A
few days later she made a shocking deathbed statement to her sisters:
she said that their father was the father of the twins, and that he had
used instruments on her to cause the abortion that killed the twins and
was soon to take her own life.Ruth died on June
25, and was buried on the 26th. An autopsy was performed, which
evidently corroborated the girl's deathbed statement, since her father,
James T. Phillips, was arrested.There was such outrage in the community that Phillips was in danger of being lynched.

Monday, June 24, 2013

The thing that drives me most crazy about the abortion-rights obsession with bashing CPCs is that they ignore quackery that kills women and rend their garments over prolifers who annoy them. At the end of this post will be a boatload of tweets to post and remind them that their priorities are way off: Of course, you can always go to my Twitter page, scroll down, and retweet!Their responses will be:

"So? Lots of people die from malpractice!" Respond w/ "What excuse is that for #prochoice movement tolerating deadly #abortion quackery?"

"CPC does, X, Y, or Z!" Ask for source. On the off chance they actually provide one (They usually just block you if you keep insisting.), check it out and critique accordingly.

I think we need to start a #ProchoicePriorities or #ExposeQuackery fest!I'll start you out with this one I found on FaceBook that's too good not to share:No woman or child has ever died inside a crisis pregnancy center. #ExposeCPC

"Annie" is one of the women Life Dynamics identifies on their "Blackmun Wall" as having been killed by a safe and legal abortion.Annie traveled from New Jersey to New York to avail herself of the new law, for a first-trimester abortion on June 24, 1971.Shortly after she was given anesthesia, Annie went into cardiac arrest, and attempts to revive her failed. She left behind three children.

There is such a dearth of information about Annie's death that it's impossible to determine if it was due to quackery or was just an ordinary complication of surgery or anesthesia, which was riskier at the time than it is now. Still, her children would have been better off with a new sibling than with a dead mother.

We can see that starting in the 1940s, while abortion was still illegal,
there was a massive drop in maternal mortality from abortion. The death
toll fell from 1,407 in 1940, to 744 in 1945, to 263 in 1950. Most
researches attribute this plunge to the development of blood transfusion
techniques and the introduction of antibiotics. And as you can see from
the graph below, the fall in abortion deaths was in place long before
legalization. Legalization did nothing to change the number of deaths
each year; the trend had been in place for decades. Learn more here.

#ExposeCPC
They don’t misdiagnose patients, perform the wrong procedure, then send them home to die #prochoice
http://abortiondocs.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Alan-Ross-License-Suspension-Dec-28-1993.pdf

Saturday, June 22, 2013

The first two deaths we commemorate today are of a woman and a teenage girl who died from "safe and legal" abortions. In both of these cases, as well as in a related case, abortion facility staff made appalling screw-ups in medicating patients and in their attempts at resuscitation. And although less is known about the circumstances of the third death, it still falls under the category of "safe abortion" as defined by advocates of legalization.

AbortionistDr. Dehli Thweatt

Thirty-two-year-old Kelly
Morse of Vermont traveled with her husband to Hillcrest Women's Medical Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for an abortion on June 19, 1996. Because the waiting room of the clinic was
so crowded, Kelly's husband, Scott, waited for her outside. No doubt his attention was grabbed by the sound of an approaching ambulance. Just as it was pulling into the clinic driveway, a clinic staffer came out and told Scott that the ambulance was there for his wife He went in with the ambulance crew to find Kelly, naked and blue-black from lack of oxygen, lying on a table that was
halfway out of the examination room into the hallway. The paramedics put
a breathing tube into Kelly, properly administered medications, and performed
CPR as they transported Kelly to nearby Polyclinic Medical Center, where she was
admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. Her condition continued to
deteriorate, and she was pronounced dead on June 22. An investigation found that even though Kelly had
notified Hillcrest staff that she had asthma and was allergic to the "caine"
medications, including Lidocaine, Abortionist Dehli Thweatt (pictured) administered
Lidocaine to Kelly at about 11 a.m. Kelly immediately had trouble
breathing. A licensed practical nurse got Kelly's inhaler from her purse and
helped her to use it, but it was not helping. Thweatt
continued with the abortion, completing it in about four minutes, and spent some
time providing ineffectual care to Kelly before having an ambulance
summoned. The lawsuit filed by Kelly's widower noted, "No one started an IV. No
respiration rate was recorded, no pulse was checked and no blood pressure was
measured. No EKG was applied. No cardiac monitoring was conducted. No pulse
oximeter was applied. No intubation or emergency tracheotomy was performed. No
oxygen was administered. Kelly continued to agitate in fear, desperately gasping
for air, and remained blue in color. Defendant Thweatt just stood there with a
stethoscope in hand and listened to Kelly's breathing and wheezing progressively
worsen." Court documents in
the case indicate that Hillcrest advertised Thweatt as being a Board-certified
ob/gyn, yet "Defendant Thweatt failed the Ob/Gyn Board certification examination
not once, not twice, but on three consecutive attempts." Dr. Earl McLeod, who operates Hillcrest, also had a patient die after not being properly resuscitated.Shortly
after midnight on June 22, 1985, a hospital staffer checked on 17-year-old Deborah Ann Lozinski. Deborah had been in a coma since the day she had undergone a safe and legal abortion at Medical Care Center in Woodbridge, New Jersey two months earlier. Deborah's parents filed suit against Dr. Scheininger, Dr. Sinha,
and other staff for failing to properly screen and examine Deborah
prior to her abortion. They also said that staff failed to properly
monitor their daughter's vital signs during the abortion, failing to
quickly detect and properly treat respiratory difficulty. As a result,
Deborah suffered the brain damage that had caused her coma.

These abortion deaths fall under the classification of "safe abortion" as defined by the international abortion rights lobby. The same can be said of the illegal abortion death we commemorate today.

On June 22, 1928, 31-year-old Rose Hannover died at the office of Dr.
Lester I. Ofner from complications of an abortion performed there that
day. Ofner was held by the coroner on July 28. On November 28, he was
acquitted. The source documents do not indicate why, so we have no way
of knowing if he was wrongly identified by the coroner, if the
prosecution screwed up, or if the way the law was written made getting a
conviction difficult. However, since Offner had the training, and the available tools, to get Rose safely through the abortion, her abortion, although fatal, was "safe."

Friday, June 21, 2013

I'll start by giving you Josh Brahm's splendiferous response to a listener mail about whether or not incremental absolutism (chipping away until you get all babies protected) is an endorsement of killing the babies a law does not protect.

For those who don't want to listen to the whole thing at the moment, I'll take a juicy chunk from Josh's blog post on the topic:

Here’s the question: do you think it’s more important to make an impact or to make a statement? I’d rather make an impact, and I reject the notion that passing a bill with a rape exception tacked onto it at the last minute sends a message to pro-choice people that we don’t care about the babies conceived in rape that are sometimes killed in abortions. They know we want to make all abortions illegal, and that makes them furious. But passing a bill that bans abortions after 20-weeks because CLEARLY those babies can feel pain would be the most significant legal pro-life victory since the Supreme Court passed the Gonzales vs. Carhart decision, upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions.

When I say I’d rather make an impact than a statement, some absolutists accuse me of following the wisdom of man instead of the heart of God. My response: the midwives in Exodus 1 made an impact by saving as many babies as they could, and they are praised for it, even though they didn’t make a statement. When the Pharaoh confronted them, they didn’t make a pro-life argument or statement; they lied about it so that they could continue saving some! It could be argued that they were implicitly telling the leader of the land that it’s okay to kill infants. They never to his face say, “You shouldn’t do that.” They lied, and saved as many as they could, and are praised and blessed by God.

As you can probably tell from my blog, my own approach is neither incrementalism (nickle and diming abortion to death) nor absolutism (just get it banned in one fell swoop). This does not mean that I do not support incrementalists or absolutists. I think that both are necessary.

Imagine the abortion monolith as a building. Both the incrementalists and the absolutists want that building DOWN. Incrementalists are doing things that undermine the structural integrity of the building. Absolutists are planting demolition charges. It would take ages for the incrementalists to bring that building down. But this building is so solidly built, so heavily reinforced with steel, that the amount of dynamite the absolutists have would only rattle the building and make chunks fall off. The building itself will still be standing. I think that God shows His wisdom in that he set people to both tasks -- undermining the structural integrity and planting the demolition charges. And I think it's not just stupid but sinful for those one one work crew, incrementalist or absolutist, to bear false witness against the other work crew, claiming that they don't really want the building to come down.

Of course, the whole image has to be abandoned as just that -- an image. Abortion is not a building that we can demolish. It is a manifestation of Evil. Capital-E Evil. There is an intelligence behind it, a diabolical intelligence that has been around for a very, very long time and is very, very good at what it does. We are guilty of a hubris that puts White Star Line to shame if we think we can defeat that Evil by passing laws of any sort.

Which is what I'm back to. A Wisdom far greater than ours is directing this effort. We need to work at the tasks that are set before each of us. Some of us are set to directly helping women. Some of us are set to work in the legal arena. Some of us are set to educational tasks. Some of us are set to incrementalist tasks and some to absolutist tasks, because both are necessary.

But not a one of us has the task of attacking others who are set to different tasks.

On June 21, 1929,
25-year-old Fannie Shead, a native of Huntsville, Alabama, died in
Chicago from a criminal abortion performed that day by an unknown
perpetrator. Interestingly, the coroner only recommended an arrest for
"unintentional manslaughter," not the usual homicide by abortion. I
wonder if this might be due to the fact that unlike the other victims of
Chicago abortionists whose cases I've documented, Fannie Shead was
Black.Oddly, the database lists a date a defendant was arrested -- August 10 -- but does not list a suspect.

Since I don't know who the abortionist was, I can't determine if Fannie's fatal abortion meets the criteria for "safe" abortion -- though it certainly wasn't safe for Fannie and her baby. Addressing whatever issues were convincing her that abortion was her only option, of course, would have prevented her death, regardless of who the neighborhood abortionists were.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Milan Vuitch
(pictured) was a hero among abortion advocates. He had deliberately
been arrested performing criminal abortions so that he could challenge
the Washington, DC abortion law, and he succeeded in changing the way
the law was enforced, effectively nullifying it.
On June 15, 1974, seventeen-year-old Wilma Harris went to Vuitch's Laurel Clinic for a safe and abortion. Five days later, on June 20, she was dead. Although the
abortion was done at around 2:00 PM, Vuitch didn't transfer Wilma to a
properly equipped hospital until after midnight. Wilma's family sued,
claiming that Vuitch and his staff had allowed Wilma to lapse into a
coma and lie unattended for 12 hours before transferring her to the
hospital. The suit also claimed that Vuitch and his staff falsified
records to cover their tracks.
The family won a judgment on December 23, 1976, but the settlement was sealed by court order.
Georgianna English also died after an abortion by Vuitch.Vuitch isn't the
only abortionist who kept his nose clean as a criminal abortionist, only
to kill two patients after legalization. Jesse Ketchum managed to kill Margaret Smith and Carole Schaner
in a four-month period after New York put out a welcome mat for
carpetbagging abortionists in 1970. Benjamin Munson of South Dakota
killed Linda Padfield and Yvonne Mesteth. As we saw with Kermit Gosnell, quackery thrives in an environment in which there is a presumption that abortionists can be trusted.

The next two fatal abortions, though illegal, meet the abortion lobby's standards for "safe abortion" because they were performed with people who had the training and tools necessary to get their patients safely through their abortions.

On June 20, 1929, 28-year-old Jennie Kuba died at Chicago hospital from an abortion performed there that day by midwifeMary Zwieniczak. Zwienczak was arrested July 13. The coroner also recommended the arrest of Dr. Joseph Mienczak, who assisted Zwieniczak, as an accessory. The grand jury handed down an indictment of homicide. On June 20 or 24, 1908, 36-year-old housekeeper Lillian O'Neill
died in Dr. Albert C. Davis's Chicago office from complications of an
abortion performed June 20.
Davis was acquitted for reasons not given in the source document. A
midwife named Cornelia Meyers was arrested, tried, convicted, and
sentenced to Joliet.

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